ANALYSIS AND NEWS


associate’ (PDRA) or as a ‘research fellow’ having won their own (full or partial) funding. This arrangement makes it difficult to establish an independent reputation because credit for work often goes to the last author on the paper rather than the first. ECRs often spend considerable time training PhD and masters students, collaborating with peers and proof reading manuscripts, all of which takes time away from producing all-important first-author publications.


Peer review


Most peer review is undertaken by ECRs. It would be interesting to know if statistics back this assertion but, very often, busy academics ask post-docs (as well as PhD students) in their labs to review papers. This often makes sense as ECRs are experienced researchers but have more time to read the detail of the papers, are undertaking lab work on a day-to-day basis and have fewer vested interests in the politics of who wrote the paper as opposed to the quality of the science. However, very often the reviews are submitted in the name of the supervisor without acknowledgement to the person who actually wrote the review. Journal editors would have access to a much larger pool of reviewers if they insisted that academics gave recognition to ‘co- reviewers’. In that situation ECRs would benefit from being able to build reputations with journal


editors and science would benefit from a dilution of ‘peers’ in the review system.


Keeping up with the literature The sheer scale of the literature makes keeping up to date increasingly difficult, and this is all the harder for ECRs who may have to keep moving from field to field. Better tools for searching and accessing literature, learning new techniques and keeping up to date with developments would all be valuable to ECRs.


‘Publishers bring recognition to our work and help us climb the ivory tower’


Most citations, at least in a paper’s introduction, are arbitrarily chosen from a vast literature based on their title, journal, last author, year of publication and perhaps abstract without being read in any detail. However, most research builds on specific techniques and observations detailed in the results and experimental sections. The trend to condense several years of work in the form of a higher-impact communication can mean key details and insights are missed out from methods and discussion sections leading to precious months wasted trying to reproduce results.


Most ECRs are keenly aware of which journals have good reputations in their field and cite accordingly.


The lack of faculty positions means that the majority of ECRs will not continue in academia. However, in many cases the tools and brands that ECRs are exposed to in the academy will transfer to jobs in industry, science communication and government. A key frustration of ECRs is that their years spent beyond their PhD in academia are often not valued by employers. This raises the stakes when deciding whether to take ‘one more’ post-doc in the hope of securing something more permanent. Are the extra years of ‘post- doc experience’ reading, writing and reviewing literature valued in the starting salaries of ECRs who turn to a career in publishing? The interests of ECRs and publishers are closely aligned and both need to better understand the pressures and challenges faced by the other in order to survive in a competitive marketplace. ECRs consume, supply and refine publishers’ products. Publishers bring recognition to our work and help us climb the ivory tower.


This article is adapted from a talk and panel discussion at the STM Publishers conference in Frankfurt by Jonathan Foster, an early career researcher at the University of Cambridge. His place on the panel was the result of an essay competition organised by Wiley and his winning essay is published on the Wiley Exchange Blog.


Group discussions followed. These were very lively and concentrated on our common goals, problems that needed solving, and how to move forward.


It seems that the first thing we need to do is to raise levels of knowledge. We can’t discuss solutions if we don’t know about each others’ needs, fears, budgetary concerns and workflows. The potential for collaboration is great; there are many competencies in the library community that publishers could use – such as metadata, indexing, models and platform interface. In turn, librarians need to know more about the e-book market, demand, pricing and copyright issues. The second thing is to establish a long-term forum for discussions and dialogue. Many participants thought the issue of Swedish e-books should be a question for the National Library as it has lot of experience of relations with publishers. Another suggestion was to set up a ‘library/publisher advisory board’. The third big issue is platforms, models and access. Some publishers already have their own platform, some are considering an aggregator and


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some have nothing. We discussed what the best approach would be for a small Swedish publisher. To invest in developing an own platform can be both difficult and costly. We hope to continue the discussion about the best platform and model solution, but it is difficult because publishers have company secrets and strategies that they can’t or won’t share. We don’t want the discussion to get stuck on those issues – but, hopefully, by talking


‘We must do what we can to be a part in the development of our services’


about a hypothetical platform we can find a ‘sweet spot’; a model that is appealing to both publishers and libraries.


A practical suggestion was to have a pilot test for a few e-books to explore the demand and possible models, but that is still a long way ahead. In this case, librarians just want to get the information out there but publishers are more


cautious, and the invitation to investigate the possibilities for a pilot scheme was turned down. Publishers felt insecure discussing their models – even hypothetical ones – and were hesitant to reveal their plans and strategies. We understand now that, perhaps, we need to back down a bit – we want to continue the dialogue, but maybe we should focus on giving information and on building knowledge. Our work is so complex, and it is a new world for them. We will also try to formalise the librarians’ collaboration on this, maybe by setting up a strategic working group of some kind. If we are many we can be more flexible but we can also speak with one voice.


It is clear that the biggest problem is that we know so little about each other’s conditions and work but we have already accomplished a lot. We have a dialogue that we didn’t have before and we have shown publishers that librarians can be their partners. We can’t change the world, but we must do what we can in the development of our services, and to be an advocate for our users.


DECEMBER 2014/JANUARY 2015 Research Information 7


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